2009 Washington DC #Drupalcon Debriefing

A week ago today I returned home from this years Drupalcon held in our nation's Capital. Nearly all the videos for this year's Drupalcon are posted!

Drupalcon ticket | $200
Flight | $178
My portion of a shared hotel | $432
Meals and Cab fare | about $200
I have to say that for about a thousand bucks, I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and networked with a huge number of  people!

Some knew me from my  Twitter Account, or from the various Drupal Groups that I post to, or from My Blog. Others knew me from my unsuccessful application to the Drupal Association. [read my comments about the experience here http://drupal.org/node/375900#comment-1265304 ]

The sessions I enjoyed most were:
Drush: command line Drupal productivity.
More Than Search: How ApacheSolr Changes the Way You Build Sites,
Project Flow and Tracker,
Why I Hate Drupal,
Building APIs that Rock,
Boosting Our Raw Capacity to Provide Drupal Training,

I made some great, new friends, some who gave me business leads. I had the opportunity to sit down with 7 authors of Drupal books representing 5 different books. I picked their brains for a big project I'm working on for a Patient Records Management system that I am developing for a small Dr's office in Florida. It goes without saying that the project moving along quite well after getting some questions answered and plenty of great ideas from those "Giants" in the Drupal community.

The biggest excitement for me this year was discovering that starting in April I will become one of the maintainers of groups.drupal.org where I will help the various geographic groups fulfil their mission to meet the needs of their local groups. I will have a whole blog post dedicated to thisv topic once I assume the role.

Soon, i would like to take some of the session videos, re-watch them and blog about them. Look for it!
 - dv
 - twitter.com/dougvann